Development Lessons From Killzone 2: An Interview

First of all, you must get a huge volume of data with a huge
audience like that. But also is it things that people say? Do you also mine
data based on server logs and stuff like that?

AB:
So, data mining is a big thing for games, right? I've been attending
all these lectures at GDC, and everybody is doing that. You look at Valve, the
Steam stats, that Bungie thing, and we're doing a lot of stuff on Killzone that's going with the Battle
Replay. It's really awesome, I think that's the next step in how you see that
kind of stuff evolving.

And trying to get that data
back in and anonymize it -- within the legal bounds of not dealing with
personal information -- there's a lot of value to be had there. I think that you
can also use it to keep on improving your game.

And even the single-player
aspects. You know, if you find levels that have too many deaths in certain
sections, you can kind of fix those during development but maybe also after
development. We can also patch such things if we need to.

And just analyzing all that
data, you know. 700,000 or more people, how long are they playing? Why are they
leaving? What patch do they reach? Is it our ramp up of reaching patches? Is
that good enough? Does that need to be steeper or not?

Those kinds of patterns,
we're all analyzing and thinking about, "Do we want to fix this for Killzone 2 or for our next game?"
Such things, you know, it's really important.

You are also getting data about the single-player game. Is that
something you prioritize when releasing patches, or is it mainly multiplayer?

AB:
So, the longevity of the game is certainly in multiplayer. People
are spending way more hours in multiplayer. That's dynamic, you know. It's where
people are talking about the cool games they're having and inviting friends
over. It's the key to success, to selling really, really many millions of
copies.

HH:
Plus single-player, you can user-test it a lot better before
release. So, you know, there's only so much you can do in terms of duration and
in terms of amount of players in a beta. We try to do as much as we can. There's
always stuff you're going to oversee, that slips internal QA as well as
external user-testing, particularly on the multiplayer side.

It's also a complex game, right?

HH:
It's rather complex. I mean, it's very feature-rich, and it's got a
lot of stuff in it. A lot of stuff can be changed.

To change tracks, Alex pointed out that you had a real-time demo of
the 4D bullet stuff, so I'm actually really curious... [note: the demo was
released onto PSN April 2.]

HH:
Couple opening comments on that. You've seen the trailer probably on
the TV here, but we wanted to create an interactive version of it, kind of as a
testament of our technology and kind of a statement that we as Guerilla Games
no longer have to rely on pre-rendered stuff to communicate our vision.

I think
this is a great way of doing that. Arjan is just demonstrating it now. He
tracked the bullet across the battlefield, just like you are in the trailer,
however...

Obviously, this is scripted and for show, but when you do something
more experimental like this and more visual, does this give you a jumping off point
where you can do something? Like give you ideas to experiment for gameplay.

AB:
Yes, I think it also has that, but more importantly for us... So
Martin came up with the idea of having another kind of trailer and let's render
it in-engine. You know, "Let's do it in real time! Let's get away from
that whole fricking trailer thing, ever."

[laughs]

AB:
That was kind of scary, but we managed to do that.

But also, what you see is
that you put in Hollywood quality, 100,000 polygon models into an engine, and
to see how that pipeline works is really interesting. Sometimes in development,
we think, "Well, this is so difficult. Nobody understands how we do this kind
of content."

And we've got people from
the special effects industry, that helped us with throwing some high-end models
in. And that actually worked fine, so our engine can even handle that kind of
stuff. And we had to fix a couple things, so we found a couple of things that
actually we can improve. So with future games, we can do even more high-poly
models, etcetera. So it's a really good learning experience for us.